Chapter in: Marianne Beisheim (Hg.): Country-level Politics around the SDGs. Analysing political will as a critical element of the Mid-Term Review of the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs, SWP Research Paper 2023/RP 07, 10.07.2023
Sudan faces huge challenges to implementation of the SDGs: political instability following decades of authoritarian rule, armed conflict, a skewed economy in deep macroeconomic crisis, and the impacts of climate change. Consequently, Sudan is among states making the slowest progress towards the SDGs, with an SDG index ranking of 159 out of 163.1
Sudan’s VNR report from 2022 does not pretend anything different. It acknowledges the country’s significant development shortcomings, the lack of sufficient current data and the state’s very weak implementation capacity in virtually all relevant areas. This apparent honesty is both selective and strategic, however. It omits the single most important factor keeping the Sudanese poor, namely the dominance of the security sector in politics and the economy. Appearing to care for the civilian population is a deliberate legitimization strategy on the part of the authors of the report, which was compiled by the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning (MoFEP). Its head, Sudan’s Minister of Finance Geibril Ibrahim, is a former rebel, an Islamist and a supporter of the military coup of October 2021. Any international support for sustainable development in Sudan thus needs to adopt an adaptive approach that includes peacebuilding and diplomacy.
Political instability and Sudan’s violent entrepreneurs
Pretending to promote broad-based development when actually engaging in politics that undermine it has a long tradition in Sudan, particularly among its armed movements. Peace agreements are full of normative language, as are the pronouncements of elite negotiators purporting to serve the interests of marginalized populations in the periphery. Power- and rent-sharing arrangements are the core objectives of Sudan’s violent entrepreneurs.2 These include regular security forces, paramilitary forces, irregular militias and armed movements, who compete or cooperate on the basis of temporary shared interests.3
SDG implementation came to a halt in recent years as Sudan experienced considerable upheaval and lacked effective government. The breakdown culminated in military conflict in April 2023. Country-wide demonstrations in 2019, provided the motivation for a palace coup that ousted Omar al-Bashir after nearly thirty years in power. A civilian-military transitional government took the reins in August 2019, led by the former UN official Abdalla Hamdok. The military and security forces retained influence in the Sovereign Council (the collective presidency) and in security-related cabinet portfolios. In October 2020, the government signed the Juba Peace Agreement (JPA) with thirteen armed movements across the country. They joined the government in February 2021, and Geibril Ibrahim became minister of finance.
Having supported the military in sidelining civilians, he and fellow JPA signatories remained in office when security forces arrested Prime Minister Hamdok and some of his ministers on 25 October 2021.
Since the coup, Sudan has had no fully functioning government. The military did not replace civilian ministers who resigned, instead promoting undersecretaries to become acting ministers. General Fattah Abdel al-Burhan, the head of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and chair of the Sovereign Council, claimed that he had seized power only to “correct” the path of the popular revolution that started in December 2018.4 When the military realized they could not succeed, Burhan announced he would be ready to hand over power to a civilian government that was either elected or created by “consensus”.5 On 5 December 2022, after months of behind-the-scenes negotiations, a framework agreement was finalized between the military and a coalition of civilian groups. Geibril and his allies rejected the framework agreement because it included a review of the earlier peace agreement, which guaranteed them their positions.6 Negotiations on outstanding issues for a final agreement escalated into armed conflict between the SAF and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) shortly before a planned handover to a civilian government in April 2023.
The VNR’s selective treatment of development challenges
The preparation of Sudan’s second VNR fell in the period after the October 2021 coup.7 This put the drafters in the interesting position of describing the achievements of a transitional government for whose demise their military allies were responsible. The fact that Sudan decided nevertheless to submit the VNR in such a volatile situation points to the main purpose of the report: courting international favour for an illegitimate government. The government also wanted to restart international financial support and debt relief, as highlighted in the VNR’s opening statement and again in the conclusion.
The main purpose of the report lies in courting international favour for an illegitimate government.
The report includes an initially perhaps surprisingly open acknowledgement of Sudan’s development challenges. It describes Sudan’s three-digit inflation and negative economic growth and mentions the escalation of “tribal and intercommunal violence”.8 Given that the process was still ongoing when the report was submitted, it can only acknowledge that “consultations with assistance from the international and regional partners to resolve the political crises and continue the path towards peace and democratic transition” were taking place.9
The report’s description of Sudan’s (lack of) achievements in ending extreme poverty (SDG1) demonstrates important characteristics that apply across its treatment of the Agenda 2030. It acknowledges the dire situation, citing data where available. On poverty, the only source is a projection based on the government’s last national household budget and poverty survey from 2014/15, which was prepared in the context of the transitional government’s work with the IMF and the World Bank on a poverty reduction strategy paper. According to the VNR, poverty increased to 64.2 percent in 2020, up from 46.5 percent in 2009.10 Even that could be an undercount according to the director of the then new Social Security Commission in 2020, who spoke of 77 percent of the population living on less than US$1.90 per day.11
The disparities in the poverty count underline the lack of reliable current data. The VNR report acknowledges that gap and notes that the lack of disaggregated current socio-economic data makes it very difficult to identify those most affected by the lack of development and thus ensure that no one is left behind, a core objective of the Agenda 2030.12
The absence of regionally disaggregated economic data is not simply a consequence of the lack of state capacity, but is rooted in wilful government policy going back to colonial times. The British colonial administration wanted “to avoid publishing numbers about Sudan’s economy for fear of making regional inequities obvious to the public. Rather than buck this trend, subsequent post-independence regimes followed suit”, write Matthew Benson and Musan Alneel on the basis of their study of Sudan’s tax system.13
The transitional government had identified a strategy to reduce poverty, which the VNR presents as a response to the dire situation. The heart of that government’s development strategy – prepared in conjunction with its international partners – was abolition of the fuel subsidy and floating of the Sudanese currency. The short-term pain was to be alleviated by a broad cash-transfer programme funded by donors. The Sudan Family Support Programme or Thamarat was to provide up to 80 percent of the population with the equivalent of US$5 per month. Its roll-out was delayed because the US government first needed to delist Sudan from its list of State Sponsors of Terrorism. Under enormous economic pressure, the Sudanese government cut the subsidies – resulting in huge price rises for transport and food. A pilot of the Thamarat project was launched in February 2021, but quickly stopped after the European Union, the United States, Germany and the World Bank halted their funding following the October coup, depriving 9.2 million registered beneficiaries of future assistance.14
As well as send a message to the coup leaders, donors wanted to prevent misuse of funds. International funding had flowed through a multi-donor trust fund into the coffers of the Sudanese Central Bank. The influx of foreign currency stabilized Sudan’s reserves, allowing the government to finance imports of food and other commodities, and thus stabilized the fragile transitional government. Aborting funding for the trust fund and thus for the Thamarat programme was intended to avoid propping up the coup authorities, whose ministry of finance also controlled the Central Bank.
The government’s narrative ignores the most significant obstacle to inclusive and sustainable development: the dominance of the security sector.
In short, the VNR describes Sudan’s dire situation relatively accurately, in a way that serves the interests of the government and in particular the armed movement–led ministry of finance.15 The report locates the causes of the problems in the long rule of the former Bashir regime, against which the armed movement fought and which the coup government purported to overcome in accordance with the Sudanese revolution. The programmes and projects of the transitional government of 2019 to 2021 are presented as still providing a response to this legacy. This narrative might suggest that all that is needed is for Sudan’s international partners to resume their funding. That, however, would be to ignore the most significant obstacle to inclusive and sustainable development: the dominance of the security sector, and the political system it has created to serve its interests.
Conflict and military repression as central development challenges
Sudan has been ruled by authoritarian military leaders for most of its post-independence history. Successive governments created an exploitative system based on the extraction of resources from the peripheries for the benefit of urban elites in the centre.16 Where populations resisted such extraction, governments deployed significant force to maintain the system. Sudan has experienced armed conflict for most of its history, with fighting and violence against civilians located almost exclusively in the peripheries.17
The Sudanese Armed Forces and other security actors became strongly engaged in the economy. This impeded the development of the private sector, but allowed the military to control vast swathes of the country’s resources and productive economy. Key stakeholders were appointed to positions of authority in exchange for their loyalty.
One of the armed movements formed in response to state violence was the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), led by Geibril Ibrahim from 2012. Once a considerable military force, JEM largely disintegrated over peace talks with the government and was defeated by government forces and expelled from Darfur in 2015. After that, it had only a few hundred troops in South Sudan and Libya.18 The JPA gave JEM and other signatories a new lease of life.
Against this background, Sudan’s 2022 VNR report serves a clear purpose. Both the coup government and Geibril personally have an incentive to emphasize their supposedly popular credentials, while distracting from their lack of legitimacy. Indeed, Geibril’s own support base is now so narrow that he travelled to Darfur in January 2023 “under heavy protection” for fear of attacks from his own Zaghawa tribe.19 Any international aid would allow him to bolster his leadership ambitions, both across Sudan and within Darfur.
Implications for donor governments
Ensuring effective international support for accelerated SDG implementation is immensely challenging in a situation of armed conflict and state capture by violence entrepreneurs. Donors need to ensure that their aid does not strengthen – even inadvertently or indirectly –the extremely exploitative and extractive system keeping most Sudanese poor. At the same time, a highly risk-averse approach would essentially shift the burden to humanitarian aid. Some communities, for example in IDP camps, have received food aid for decades, keeping whole generations aid dependent.
Since the October 2021 coup, international development partners have started to reorientate. International officials repeatedly warned the military government that time was running out to access the funds and programmes that had been granted to the transitional government but were blocked after the coup.20 Sudan’s debt relief process under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC) was effectively halted, as was progress on Sudan’s poverty reduction process agreed with the World Bank and IMF.21
Even if a civilian government is finally formed, its absorption and implementation capacity will remain very limited. In the past, donors found it difficult to get the detailed applications and reports needed to fulfil their funding requirements. As a result, it was easier to plan around the state structures. While such a procedure allows projects to proceed for the benefit of civilian populations, it undermines the government’s ownership and capacities. Any new government would need to revise or at least update the existing development planning documents.
Finally, the security sector will remain a significant impediment to any civilian government and to international donors willing to fund implementation of the SDGs. Supporting basic service delivery removes the government from its responsibility in that core area to some extent, especially when projects are implemented beyond government structures. International funding of schools, hospitals and utilities allows the government to continue spending large amounts of its own budget on the security sector and to maintain fiscal practices benefitting military-owned companies. Moreover, it is likely that the military will resist giving up its control of a large section of state-owned companies to a new civilian government; this was already a major sticking point during the 2019–2021 transitional government. Companies, banks and other entities owned or controlled by the paramilitary RSF may be even harder to transfer to civilian control. There is no transparency about their budgets and profits. As an indication of their wealth, the IMF reported a “non-transparent contribution of $2 billion from security sector owned companies” into the state budget in 2020.22
The 2030 Agenda recommends more integrated approaches to sustainable development. In Sudan this would be a development approach that includes peacebuilding and humanitarian concerns (the “triple nexus”) and is guided by an adaptive political strategy.23 An adaptive approach acknowledges complexity and uncertainty and thus allows for continuous monitoring, evaluation and learning processes above and beyond conventional project-based programming cycles. It could include, for example, small pilot projects with state-level or local governments, which could quickly be expanded or adjusted if they prove successful.
Recent research calls for a more fundamental rethink of development cooperation in conflict settings in general. Specifically, donors should take the existing coping mechanisms, perceptions and relationships of local communities more seriously in their programming decisions.24 Unpacking the political economy of conflict-affected countries’ SDG reporting should be part of such reflections.
Dr. Gerrit Kurtz 